Before DESTINY and before HALO, American video game developer Bungie made a different sci-fi first-person shooter franchise: MARATHON. The series quickly proceeded through three games in three years, ending up as an important trilogy not only in the history of Bungie, which would go on to greater success, but also shooters, Macintosh gaming, and virtual storytelling. By extension, the MARATHON series represents a crucial moment in time for video game history at large, but beyond casual mentions in relation to its successor series HALO, it doesn’t appear to me that this trilogy gets celebrated at the appropriate scale. And that…

The Pretenders are a great band, and the main reason for that is Chrissie Hynde. The rock act’s singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter is also its only constant member throughout its 40-plus year history. With that in mind, it kind of makes sense why Hynde, for so long, hadn’t branched out into the solo album game; some of the Pretenders records are primarily a Hynde artistic effort. But back in 2014, 34 years after the band’s self-titled debut, the musician put her name and her name alone on an album cover. Hynde had worked on a bunch of songs with…

The life and career of jazz singer Billie Holiday has been the subject of many fictionalized and non-fiction show business stories. The tragic background to one of the best singers of her day has most recently been brought to the screen in THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY (2021), so clearly, Holiday, who died in 1959 at age 44, is still relevant to many. As she should be. Holiday’s distinctive voice changed a lot over her 26-year recording career (from 1933 to 1959), and the reduction of her upper range towards the end of her life is attributed to her…

In the history of film, David Wark Griffith looms large. And that is mostly because of his uber-racist yet extremely important THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Legendary in a way no other movie from 1915 and its era is, Griffith’s white supremacist epic is justly and simultaneously criticized and recognized for its artistic and commercial influence. But the story of D.W. Griffith goes beyond THE BIRTH OF A NATION. From 1908 to 1931, he made 518 films. Most of those were shorts from an era much different from the post-BIRTH OF A NATION movie world, and indeed, Griffith’s films changed…

Billy Joel is one of the great American songwriters. He just is. The Piano Man created or channeled some distinct part of Americana that time and again made him a huge success. So when he stepped away from that success, at least in the form of recording new music, it was kind of incredible. Joel, now 71, last made an album 20 years ago: the classical record he composed, FANTASIES & DELUSIONS (which will be ranked on this list, by the way). That album, performed by Hyung-ki Joo, isn’t always counted as a core Joel record in the pop/rock vein…

This paper was originally written for the “Media Industries” course within the Film and Media Studies graduate program at Arizona State University, completed April 26, 2021.

The Motion Picture Production Code (MPPC) was a set of regulations for the content of American films, and was nominally in effect from 1930 to 1934 and from the late 1950s through the ’60s. In the intervening years, what was also known as the Hays Code (after regulatory instigator Will H. Hays) demonstrably shaped the topics Hollywood films could cover, preventing explicit examples of sex, racism, violence, and more. Although the MPPC was associated…

This paper was originally written as the culminating experience for the Film and Media Studies graduate program at Arizona State University, completed April 15, 2021.

The animated film has been and is often regarded as a genre as distinct as horror, romance, or science fiction. While the animation classification may be paired with comedy or musical, the reality is that an animated film is more so a medium than a genre. For a long time most animated films did fall into a similar format, from the earliest days of silent cartoons through Disney’s sound innovations and their almost singlehanded cultivation…

This paper was originally written as the culminating experience for the Film and Media Studies graduate program at Arizona State University, completed April 15, 2021.

Beginning with the stock market crash of 1929, the United States and then the world went into an economic crash known as the Great Depression, which lasted until some variable point in the late 1930s or the beginning of World War II. This time of widespread poverty paradoxically coincided with the formulation of the classic Hollywood “dream factory,”which developed the “invisible style” of American filmmaking. Film histories focused on this era often examine the influence…